Monday, August 25, 2014

Will Anger at James Foley’s Murderer Last or Will He become a Cause Célèbre like Khalid Sheikh Mohammad?

Media and political leaders have voiced outrage at the beheading of James Foley yet that outrage may eventually turn in a different direction if the history of media and political reaction to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed beheading Daniel Pearl is any indication.

Without hesitation, KSM took a knife and slashed Pearl’s neck. Muzzamil, a guard, said the “Arabs did ziba,” the Muslim ritual of slaughter. Muzzamil started to wretch. KSM yelled at him angrily and threw him out of the room. Another guard was told to go: Hussain, who later described the strangers as “Arab” to police. Only Karim and the spindly guard, Siraj ul-Haq, remained. KSM then returned his attention to Pearl. Ul-Haq was later quoted in his interrogation report saying, “Sheikh Khalid slaughtered him.”

But then there was a problem. It’s not clear if the camera actually jammed, but the cameraman, who U.S. and Pakistani officials believe may have been the younger nephew, exclaimed that he hadn’t been able to videotape the killing. KSM yelled at him. Chastened, he hurriedly fixed his camera. “The camera guy was startled,” KSM later told the FBI. “He didn’t put the video in.” KSM reenacted the scene, “this time separating Danny’s head from his body,” the guard Karim said later. To prove that Pearl was alive just before the beheading, KSM pressed on Pearl’s chest to show blood still pumping through his throat. It was a scene that would later turn the stomachs of even the most hardened Pakistani and U.S. investigators.

KSM then took Pearl’s decapitated head by the hair and held it in the air for the camera. “Khalid Sheikh picked up his head and said something in Arabic” before cutting the body into pieces, Siraj ul-Haq later told cops. Dispassionately, KSM later told FBI agents that, indeed, he had chopped up Pearl’s body. “We did it to get rid of the body,” he said.

In his book, Rodriguez recalls an unsettling prediction: “At least two of our people at the black site told me that KSM made an observation that would later prove eerily accurate. Talking about his interrogation and that of his colleagues, he said: “You know, some day your government is going to turn on you.”

“He had to make a choice between defending Khalid Sheik Mohammed or his army career,” he said. “He chose to defend Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. These are career-making cases for attorneys. And it is not without a fair degree of cynicism I say this. I mean, who makes that choice unless it’s a career option?”

Donald Arias, whose brother Adam was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City, said that he walked out of yesterday’s meeting just ten minutes in when a lead lawyer for the defense team told him that he enjoys his job.

“I asked them why they do what they did and they started spouting Constitution to me. Obviously they think that they’re coming down from Mt. Olympus to mix with the great unwashed here, we objects of pity, 9/11 families,” Arias said just moments after storming out of the meeting room. . . .

So I asked [Mohammed’s lead defense attorney David] Nevin why does he do what he does. ‘Because I enjoy my job,’” Nevin responded.

A desire to be involved with KSM isn’t limited to lawyers. The Guardian reported on an Englishman who has become a pen pal with him, making sure to explain to its audience during the article that, “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, 49, who is held at Guantánamo Bay, has endured the harshest of the CIA’s interrogation methods and allegedly confessed to a career of atrocities.”

Again, as all this goes on national leaders and others aggressively pursue the U.S. forces that captured KSM and others, and who continue fighting against Islamic terrorists. Senator Dianne Feinstein is the head of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. She, in concert with the media and activists, have spent years putting together a partisan report attacking the intelligence community, specifically the CIA for using waterboarding and other “harsh” interrogation techniques—the same ones used against KSM. President Obama has already deemed the U.S. guilty of torture because of this and The New York Times has proclaimed that it will from here forward refer to waterboarding and other techniques as “torture,” specifically referencing KSM even as it avoided mentioned his name:

Far more is now understood, such as that the C.I.A. inflicted the suffocation technique called waterboarding 183 times on a single detainee and that other techniques, such as locking a prisoner in a claustrophobic box, prolonged sleep deprivation and shackling people’s bodies into painful positions, were routinely employed in an effort to break their wills to resist interrogation.

Therefore, if history is any indication, all the current anger over James Foley’s beheading will likely soon disappear. Furthermore, any future anger may be redirected at U.S. forces should they catch Mr. Foley’s murderer. And Mr. Foley’s murderer may become a cause célèbre.